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Modifier issue

by rrkan » Fri May 29, 2009 4:05 pm
A peculiar feature of the embryonic mammalian circulatory system is that in the area of the
heart the cells adhere to one another, beating in unison and adopting specialized orientations
exclusive of one another.
(A) beating in unison and adopting
(B) they beat in unison while adopting
(C) beat in unison, and adopt
(D) beating in unison yet adopting
(E) even though they beat in unison and adopt

What is wrong with A. My understandig is beating and adopting are properly modifying cells, but answer is something else.
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by Mayur Sand » Fri May 29, 2009 9:25 pm
Here we need to show contrast between beating in unison & adopting

(A) beating in unison and adopting
(D) beating in unison yet adopting

yet does that for us in (D) rest of options have problems with parallelism

IMO (D) is correct
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by SanjeevK » Sat May 30, 2009 3:49 am
I agree with Mayur. Only D shows the proper contrast between beating in unison & adopting
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OA

by rrkan » Sat May 30, 2009 6:20 am
you are right, OA is D. But I am confused as to why contrast has to be shown here. I found a similar problem in OG which uses "damaging and destroying", in that case it makes sense to change to "damaging or destroying" because something can not be both damaged and destroyed.

If anybody encountered questions like these please share, we can all discuss and figure out a pattern here.

Thanks Mayur and Sanjeev for responding.
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by SanjeevK » Sat May 30, 2009 6:53 am
damaging and destroying are similar to each other. I mean they are used to depict similar kind of activity. However beating in unison and adopting specialized orientations exclusive of one another shows different kind of activity. The difference is between "beating in unison" and "exclusive of one another". Hence we have to show the contrast.
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